This article first appeared in the Torah U'Madda Journal,
Vol. 11 (2002-2003). The Torah U-Madda Journal is a publication
of the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary (RIETS), an affiliate
of Yeshiva University.

Teaching can have a way of entangling one's very identity, tying up
one's professional and personal self in convention and expectation. Teachers
may work hard to create a deliberate persona in the classroom that can
become hard to escape from when leaving the school building for home,
for their communities, for a visit to a friend. They are always and proudly
the teacher—until they want a separate identity but may have closed off
many tunnels of self-expression.

Several years ago, when teaching in a few post high school programs
for women, I struggled between the need to be a role model and the need
to hide from the many eyes upon me—watching me in class, over the Shabbat
table, in conversations with other teachers. Two strong pulls stretched
me to a point of weakness. On the one hand, I believed my students to
be beautiful young explorers, mapping out their own characters and religious
lives, who invited me to join them on this journey of self-discovery.
On the other hand, I felt the suffocation of educational mar'it ayin.
Were my eyes closed tightly enough as I recited a blessing before them?
Did I deal with a difficult student with the Hafez Hayyim's sensitivity?
Did I dress in accordance with their expectations? I did not want to
disappoint them, but I also wanted my own space. Role modeling became
a mixed blessing. It provided a powerful incentive to stay within the
parameters of my own highest ideals. But it also ate away at the freedom
I needed to express my individuality. I struggled to find the right balance,
to look beyond the superficiality of mar'it ayin and locate a
more genuine self in the classroom. I returned to adult education because
I found in that setting a greater respect for the varied shades of individuality
and an ability to admit the complexity of religious life in the setting
of modernity. Behind this decision lurked an important educational discussion
to be had in the Orthodox community—one that we are loath to own up to:
are we paying a steep human price for loving the image of a teacher more
than the individual teacher? Is our strength also our weakness? Are we
communicating to an educator that he or she has to be less of a person
to be more of a teacher, thereby scaring away potential candidates because
of the demand of having to be so much?

A “teaching identity” can be created by students who have strong needs
for a teacher to reflect a certain image, but it can also be created
by a teacher who cannot separate the roles of purveyor of knowledge from
personal example. It is difficult to disconnect knowledge from virtue.
Ideas are intangible commodities which help form and mold human character.
If this is or should be true for those who study ideas, all the more
so should it be true for those who teach them. When we teach history
and learn lessons about tolerance, we expect that the history teacher
himself be tolerant. When we study English literature with a teacher
who highlights the nuances of human interaction between protagonists,
we expect that she herself will be sensitive in the arena of human communication.
No one asked if this expectation is fair; it is enough to say that it
is present.

Aristotle supports this view in Nicomachean Ethics.[1] There
is a difference between virtue and a job that requires a certain skill,
what the philosopher calls art. A carpenter, for example, is not expected
to be anything other than proficient at his task. We do not care if he
is a profligate, a gossip or a deep thinker. It is enough that he can
construct a chair or build a bench. We may question whether or not a
particular moral lacuna befits someone who is able to construct a beautiful
table—namely why the beauty of one endeavor does not translate into another —but
these thoughts we keep to ourselves. However, with a person who represents
knowledge, we expect that intelligence refines character and morally
enriches the one who possesses it. Such wisdom bespeaks ideals and a
possible vision of a better society. We expect that a teacher embody
virtue and are often taken aback when an instructor of a subject can
be well versed in the details of his field but his character seems untouched
by his intellect.[2]

If this is true for teaching in general, one could argue that it is
that much more true for a teacher of religion or the teacher of another
subject who professes to be a religious person. In Orthodox Judaism,
the teacher of religion and his or her student are both bound up in the
same language of commandment and transgression, obligation and covenant.[3]This
provides a perspective through which the student views the teacher. The
teacher sacrifices some autonomy and individuality due to the claim that
both she and her student are links in the same chain of tradition. The
teacher is partly responsible for this transmission, but once the student
becomes a link, the two are directed on the same trajectory of observance.
This trajectory explains the host of aggadot in which talmidim observe
the behavior of their rabbis—called shimmus —with the hope that
they, too, will be able to uphold the high standards observed by their
scholarly mentors.[4] This relationship
of observation was seen as so critical to intellectual and spiritual
development that students, according to the Talmud, even entered into
the bathroom on occasion with their rabbis and listed what they had learned
from this private encounter.[5] The
response by one rabbi to hearing of this invasion of privacy was, “How
could you take such liberties with your master?” The question is heart-felt,
but it is the student who gets the last word in the interchange: “It
is a matter of Torah, and I was required to learn it.”

This talmudic passage is immediately followed by the stunning account
of a student who lies under his teacher's bed to understand the laws
of intimacy practiced by his rabbi and the rabbi's wife. This is a perfect
example of the role model trajectory taken to its extreme. Rav, hearing
a noise under his bed, shoos his student away in disgust, “Kahana, are
you here? Go out, because it is rude.” Neither the student nor the teacher
acknowledged the limitations of the role modeling relationship until
this point. We may side with the rabbi's need for privacy, but our sympathies
ultimately lie with this novice who took his teacher seriously. He understood
that Jewish law must be practiced in all of its particulars, and that
the teacher represents the living law. The teacher, subsequently, must
be observed in all of his quiet and private moments. We stand for a teacher
when he walks into the room just as we stand for a Torah scroll that
is out of the ark because the teacher personifies the book. R. Kahana,
too, gets the last word in our aggada as he replies to Rav, “It is a
matter of Torah, and I am required to learn it.”

This personification of law and ethics is understandable. We feel the
teacher's discomfort but also the student's eagerness to learn. The inclusion
of these passages for public study signals the Talmud's own sense of
their importance. We are asked not to blush so much that we fail to learn
the lesson contained in these interactions. For the teacher, this lack
of

inhibition can create an unrealistic and squelching diminution of self.
The teacher does not always feel free to be other than what his students
expect him to be, not in the bathroom nor in the bedroom. We might recall
early impressions of this predicament. Young children who see a teacher
in a restaurant or grocery store are often overwhelmed by the fact that
a teacher of theirs actually eats or purchases food. The teacher seems
immortal to their young innocent minds; teachers seem to live in the
school yards and need no human nourishment. They are not people with
backyards and backaches; they are demi-gods with authority and wisdom.

We then arrive at an age when bad teachers can become the victims of
ridicule and the all too human failures of bad breath or an inability
to discipline. Bad teachers become all too human, but good teachers do
not. They still retain their Mount Olympus status; the better of their
students imagines growing up and becoming the same kind of sixth grade
teacher

that they are. As students get older, bad teachers continue to suffer
from critical judgment but good teachers often become anchors for the
turbulence of adolescence. In these instances, students can eat up the
identity of the good teacher. They want to see wedding albums and how
the teacher plays ball and what he or she eats for lunch. Far from denying
the teacher's human needs, they want to see them all. No teacher wants
to disappoint his hopeful students, so he or she may grant limited access
in between classes or after school.

Sometimes teachers do not want to separate between these distinct spheres.
They feel that role modeling is at the core of teaching and is just as,
if not more, important than content. They feel comfortable enough with
themselves to invite students into their home lives; the dinner table
is more important than the chalk board for the life lessons they are
teaching.[6]As mentioned earlier,
post-high school education, in particular, can benefit or suffer from
this blurring of personal and professional lives. It is common within
Orthodox settings to send students to Israel for a year or more to experience
text study in a more intense environment than is generally offered in
a Jewish day school. The intensity of textual rigor with Israel as its
background is heightened by the fact that the teacher/student relationship
can change dramatically. Students appreciating independence from parents
and their home communities explore the newness of this independence with
their new rabbis or teachers. Teachers, often acting in loco parentis,
do invite students to their homes. They are expected to move from text
to life with their pupils and serve as personal examples. But many a
teacher in such an institution has shared the complaint of being stifled
by the very job they have chosen. Teachers do not want to find their
students under the proverbial bed, but they do not always know how to
set limitations on a relationship they initially welcomed.

There is another risk in the role-modeling gambit that can be best expressed
in a question: is the teacher/role-model genuinely interested in the
character development of the student[7]or
is he or she more concerned with being a charismatic figure, living up
to an image where the teacher and not the student is central?[8]Is
the role modeling genuinely for the student or is it about the ego of
the teacher? Teachers can sometimes be a little too anxious to open their
lives to students. There may be something potentially arrogant in the
invitation. Watch me. Pray like me. Learn like me. Be like me. Instead
we need to tell our students that they need to pray with their own
intensity, learn as best they can and find their own formula
for religious growth. Teachers who fail to do this and encourage an almost
voyeuristic approach to kiruv, may need to let go of an inflated
self-image in order to really see the student who stands before them.
This ego-centered view of teaching can sadly lead the teacher to become
judge and critic. Teachers can be guilty of prying too much when it comes
to the personal lives of their students. More than we fear the student
under the bed should we fear the teacher under the student's bed.

The need to protect the teacher's authenticity, individuality and privacy
and ensure that the student's development rather than the teacher's ego
is central, brings us back to finding and setting limitations. In my
own search for these limitations, I discovered an important text by Martin
Buber, “The Education of Character.” Buber begins by sharing a concern
that education is reflective of more than the acquisition of knowledge.
A teacher must always be concerned with “the person as a whole, both
in the actuality in which he lives before you now and in his possibilities,
what he can become.”[9]As in traditional
Jewish education, the education of character is part and parcel of the
endeavor.[10]With

this, however, Buber warns that a teacher must be aware of “the fundamental
limits to conscious influence.”[11]He
contends that pupils who sense that a teacher is consciously trying to
meld their characters will react be showing signs of their own independence.
The pupil will detect the “hidden motive” or agenda behind a teacher's
attempt to influence to the detriment of trust. Instead, the teacher
must present himself to his students honestly and directly:

Only in his whole being, in all of his spontaneity, can the educator
truly affect the whole being of his pupil. For educating characters you
do not need a moral genius, but you do need a man who is wholly alive
and able to communicate himself directly to his fellow beings. His aliveness
streams out to them and affects them most strongly and purely when he
has no thought of affecting them.[12]

Buber uses the ambiguous language of aliveness and wholeness to communicate
authenticity. In other words, the teacher should not be concerned with
affect. The more he or she is conscious of affect, the less effective
genuine character education and role modeling will be.[13]The
more an educator shows the stamp of his own unique humanity, the more
the student will be able to look for that uniqueness in his own character.
Buber inspires the teacher concerned with character education to begin
the exploration not with his student but with himself.

One has to begin by pointing to that sphere where man himself, in the
hours of utter solitude, occasionally becomes aware of the disease through
sudden pain: by pointing to the relation of the individual to his own
self.

In order to enter into a personal relation with the absolute, it is
first necessary to be a person again, to rescue one's real personal self
from the fiery jaws of collectivism which devours all selfhood. The desire
to do this is latent in the pain the individual suffers through his distorted
relation to

his own self. Again and again he dulls the pain with a subtle poison
and thus suppresses the desire as well. To keep the pain awake, to waken
the desire—that is the first task of everyone who regrets the obscuring
of eternity. It is also the first task of the genuine educator in our
time.14[14]

Character education of the student begins with an acceptance of the
uniqueness of the teacher. The teacher must be at home with the existential
joy and pain of his individuality, not hide from it. Although it is impossible
to communicate utter solitude to another, it is not impossible to articulate
that a teacher can be both traditional and autonomous. Nor is it difficult
to convey that a teacher is not a completed, perfect being but is still
himself part of a learning community. Role models who are not afraid
to show their own struggles are no less role models; they may, in fact,
show the student a good deal more about personal growth.

It is easier to hide from individuality when the teacher and student
both live by the same code of law and ethics. But what will ultimately
make an impression upon the student is the individual recipe that the
teacher created for his or her Judaism, the unique personal interpretation
that the teacher struggled to arrive at in his hours of “utter solitude.”[15]

As more and more educational institutions in the Orthodox community
strive to create codes of dress, speech and behavior that are easily
mimicked, the teacher's task becomes more daunting. Where the language
of convention flattens, dulls and provides a slip-in identity for students
and teachers alike, the teacher must resist and instead show his students
what they will learn with time if they do not learn it in a classroom—humanity
compels complexity. The teacher can offer up this complexity in the searching
portrait he offers of himself or he can resort to cliches and social
norms, all the while denying intellectual and spiritual ferment. Instead
of a self-confident sense of arrival, the teacher can present character
education as a process or journey which she herself is still engaged
in and to which she invites the student to join. The invitation to be
part of this process can cut the form of an enriching diagonal line upon
which both student and teacher find themselves, rather than the vertical
ascension of the student to the height of the teacher.

Today educators often get pushed into image-making, shaping themselves
according to their student's needs or convention's demands. The self-conscious
creation of an external professional persona is based on the mar'it
ayin approach mentioned previously. In this occupational hazard,
educators can lose more than personal identity; they may be vanquishing
the kind of excitement and ability to influence that first brought them
to the classroom. The idea of shimmush challenges superficial
image-making because it is the student who must meet the teacher where
the teacher is. Shimmush demands the observation of many teachers
and scholars, exposing students to a variety of approaches and lifestyles.
In this model, students do not get stuck in one picture of Jewish life
because they open themselves up to multiple portraitures of individuality.
Educational mar'it ayin should give way to traditional notions
of shimmush where the teacher is allowed to live in his or her
complexity while interacting with students. Keeping up impressions can
be very tiring. The luster of teaching can wear off from the exhaustion
of role modeling. Before it does, the educator must re-energize his eros
with education by inviting a dialogue with his authentic self.[16]

The author would like to thank Daniel Marom, Michael Rosenak, Rami
Wernick and the editors and editorial assistant of The Torah
u-Madda Journal for their comments and suggestions.

[2]Kimberly Patton has argued that
this is also true of academics who are teachers of religion. Students
do not assume objectivity or neutrality of professors in the academic
study of religion: “The effective teacher is part parent, part priest,
part psychopomp. There is no way around this mandate; ignore it, as we
have at the university level...and confusion and betrayal are the results.” See
Patton, “‘Stumbling Along between the Immensities': Reflections on Teaching
in the Study of Religion,” Journal of the AmericanAcademy of
Religion 65, 4 (1997): 835-6.

[3]This discussion raises, among
other things, the issue of student motivation. Students are often motivated
by needs to conform to the conventions set by teacher, tradition or community.
Mordechai Nissan distinguishes between first-order and second-order motivation
as it applies to education. First-order motivation applies to the needs
of the individual whereas second-order motivation involves an individual's
cognition of desirable behavior to satisfy the needs of others. Students
on the same religious trajectory as teachers are often motivated by the
desire to please the teacher rather than to please themselves. This can
involve complications in the religious development of the student in
the teacher's absence. See Nissan, “Beyond Intrinsic Motivation: Cultivating
a ‘Sense of the Desirable'” in Effective and ResponsibleTeaching:
The New Synthesis, ed. Fritz K. Oser, Andreas Dick, Jean-Luc Patry
(San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1992), 126-138. The first and second order
distinction is original to Harry G. Frankfurt, “Freedom of the Will and
the Concept of a Person,” Journal of Philosophy, 63 (1971): 5-20.

[4]The idea of “shimmush” in
the Sifrei (357:7) is based on Moses' service to the children
of Israel for forty years. This number forty becomes the paradigmatic
number for effective observation; in the same midrash Hillel does shimmush for
forty years as does R. Yoh. anan ben Zakkai and R. Akiva. In Avot (6:5),
one of the forty-eight ways of acquiring the Torah is through “shimmush
h. akhamim,” and one of the reasons that Israel suffers from so much
argument was the failure of Hillel and Shammai's students to do sufficient “shimmush” (Tosefta
Hagiga 2:9). Avot de-Rabbi Natan makes the bold suggestion
that someone who does not serve and observe scholars loses his portion
in the world to come (end of chapter 36). Jonathan Cohen uses yet another
rabbinic example to examine the teacher/student relationship. See his “On
the Moral Significance of Teaching: An Examination of an Aggadic Story” [Heb.],
in Studies in Jewish Education, vol.1, ed. Barry Chazan (Jerusalem:
Magnes Press, 1983), pp.40-50.

[5]Berakhot 62a. Both Rabbi
Akiva and Ben Azzai are later told off for their brazenness.

[6]The popular bestseller, Tuesdays
with Morrie by Mitch Albom (New York: Doubleday, 1997) is predicated
on exactly this idea—that learning is about a relationship to the teacher
more than it is about the subject studied together.

[7]Cate Siejk in “Learning to Love
the Questions: Religious Education in an Age of Unbelief” (Religious
Education 94, 2 [1999]:155-171) discusses the possibility (within
a Christian context) that postmodern views of knowledge may help religious
educators understand “education as a community process instead of as
a product.” Then, the author argues, “Genuine conversation, inquiry and
dialogue—the dialectical process—are intrinsic to such a pedagogy” (p.170),
and may move the teacher away from the dangers of rolemodeling and towards
a richer conversation with students.

[8]It is important for teachers of
religion to be aware of the fine distinction between education and indoctrination.
Orthodox instructors may not want to admit that there is indoctrination—only
religion. For more on this sticky issue, see I. A. Snook, Indoctrination
and Education (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972) and Michael
Rosenak, “Jewish Religious Education and Indoctrination” in Studies
in Jewish Education, vol.1, pp.117-38. Rosenak distinguishes the method
criterion of indoctrination—use of threats, suppression of evidence
or charisma—from the content criterion—use of an accepted set
of dogma to promote a world-view. Orthodox educators may feel more comfortable
with the latter while not fully acknowledging the danger of the former.

[15]Yehuda Gellman in “Teshuvah
and Authenticity” makes a similar claim about the process of repentance
(Tradition, 20, 3 [1982], pp.249-253). The more he is surrounded
by teshuvah—twenty principles, six steps, eight levels, etc. the
less the dance of teshuvah feels authentic to him. For more on
personal authenticity from a philosophical angle, see Charles Taylor, The
Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1991) particularly “The Sources of Authenticity,” pp. 25-29, and “The
Need for Recognition,” pp. 43-53.

[16]See Joseph Schwab, “Eros and
Education: A Discussion of One Aspect of Discussion,” in Science,
Curriculum and Liberal Education, ed. Ian Westbury and Neil J.Wilkof,
(Chicago: University of Chicago, 1978), pp.105-132. Schwab sees this
eros—“this energy of wanting” as the root of intellectual energy and
the key to effective teaching. He also calls it “a regard for self, a
desire for selfhood” (p.111).